Interesting Items 08/12

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Shootings
2. Supremacist
3. Truth
4. Babylon Bee
5. Lawsuits
6. Doxing
7. Cleanup
8. Preggers
9. Greenland

1. Shootings. A pair of mass shootings a little over a week ago lit the latest group of anti-civil rights torches by the democrats, the media and cowardly Republicans.  One was at an El Paso (ELP) Walmart where a guy killed 22.  He posted his “manifesto” online shortly before going to work.  Turns out he is an eco-warrior, who thinks massive immigration is making it impossible to save Mother Gaia, so he went to kill as many Mexicans as possible.  This was interpreted by the media as a right-wing, anti-Hispanic racist.  The Dayton shooter was an Elizabeth Warren supporter who also spoke about Antifa in glowing terms.  So, we have the first Antifa mass shooter, something also ignored by the media.  Media and democrat reaction were instantaneous, with the rhetoric ratcheted up past Defcon 9.  Demands for gun control flew early and often, with background checks and Red Flag laws at the top of list of demands.  The senate majority in their best Pavlovian response promised to bring up both of them when they get back in September.  President Trump appeared to play along at least for a little while.  He needs to be careful on this, as democrats know that enough of his base will desert him if he goes for these laws, neither of which would have stopped either shooter, that they will be able to defeat him next year, which is why they are demanding it.  Essentially, they are reprising their No New Taxes attack on Bush 41 which defeated him in 1992.  While I expect the reaction to any mass shooting these days, I am getting really tired of this little Passion Play time after time after time.

 

2. Supremacist. The latest anti-conservative, anti-right, anti-Republican epithet from the media and democrats is “white supremacist.”  This is supposed to conjure up images of men in white hoods, midnight cross burnings, lynchings, swastikas (though not necessarily in that order).  Note how many of the newly assigned uglies are all products of the political left, with the first three being products of the paramilitary / terrorist arm of the democrat party started after the Civil war, and a political party that calls itself National Socialists.  Socialists are currently great with the democrat party, though the use of swastikas is occasionally frowned upon.  I wonder why National Socialists are necessarily any worse than plain socialists.

 

3. Truth. The political left does not tolerate much truth in public these days.  Latest example of this was a Tweet from astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson right after the Dayton and ELP shootings that tried to put the death toll in perspective:

In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

The backlash was nearly instantaneous and profoundly vicious.  Tyson did the apology tour soon after.  One must not commit truth in public when the left is involved.

 

4. Babylon Bee. You always know you are effective when the left starts trying to destroy you.  Next up to bat is the Babylon Bee, a Christian online satire site, though effectiveness is entirely up to you, as it is difficult these days to tell what comes out of the left is real or satire anymore. In a time when Orwell’s 1984 has become a how to do it manual rather than a warning, the left has fallen a long way.  Always reliable leftist apologist site Snopes has taken upon itself to start fact checking the BB’s posts.  Problem is that these are typically satire.  Snopes’ agenda here is to use its power as a FB-recognized fact checker to blacklist and in turn demonetize the BB.  Once the FB algorithms kick in, the site will be hidden and demonetized, effectively putting it out of business.  Last week, Snopes upped the ante and rather than rating an article as “false”, it went so far as to suggest they were intentionally misleading their readers, not unlike what CNN and MSNBC do.  Snopes is attempting to treat the Bee as a source of intentionally misleading fake news rather than the legitimate satire publication (like the Onion) they are.  Snopes has been “fact checking” the Bee since 2016 but only recently managed to get FB’s attention, as FB fired off a warning shot to the Bee in March threatening it with “limitations and demonetization.”  The Bee fought back, and FB eventually backed off.  Good news, but they are getting closer.  The other player in the March event was CNN’s Brian Stelter publishing a Tweet right before the Snopes finding accusing the Bee of being a “fake news site” disguising itself as satire.  Stelter eventually deleted the Tweet.  This sure sounds like an orchestrated hit on the Babylon Bee with CNN, Snopes and FB all involved.

 

5. Lawsuits. For pure comedy gold, we have fired and disgraced FIB Special Agent Peter Strzok and former FIB Deputy Administrator Andrew McCabe, both of whom were up to their necks and associated bodily orifi in the illegal, unconstitutional, and thoroughly lawless attempt to remove Donald Trump from office, filing wrongful termination lawsuits against the DoJ.  McCabe claims that Trump removed DoJ officials who were not politically loyal to him.  Strzok claims that his termination was politically driven and illegal.  Given that these two clowns were at the center of the Deep State coup against President Trump, I think discovery is going to be fascinating, especially recovery of the Strzok – Page SMS text files that the Mueller investigation allowed to be deleted before firing Strzok from the investigation.  GoFundMe page for Strzok raised $450,000 as of a year ago.  Its current value is unknown.  There’s going to be a LOT of dirty laundry aired in these trials.  I wonder if the coup plotters and the FISA Court judges who went along with it can stand it.  Final question would be how much coordination between the two groups of lawyers is going on?  My guess would be that is a non-zero number.  They both now despise former FIB Director Comey but worked closely together for the last couple decades.

 

6. Doxing. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D, TX) turned the notion of campaign donations on its head last week tweeting personal information about 44 Trump donors in his San Antonio congressional district that donated to President Trump.  He accused the donors of “… fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’”  As the week went on, Castro, the manager for his brother’s failing presidential campaign, went on national TV defending his action.  The problem with all of this is that Castro and those like him justify heinous actions with the language of academia, where if you designate anyone as The Other, you are absolved, nay required to do whatever you can to ensure they are not successful or better yet, destroyed.  Castro’s problem is that many of his list of 44 were also Castro donors, correctly identifying the political donation game as a protection racket.  He also invited the Twitter and associated online mob to visit and otherwise “educate” the wrongthink donors as to the error of their ways.  This led to record crowds visiting at least one restaurant.  Castro is not only using the donor list to out Trump donors; he also intends to use it to intimidate Trump donors from future donations.  Reactions as expected were varied, with the media either ignoring the doxing or excusing it outright.  For their part, Trump donors took various protective measures including renewing their family personal defense plans.  At least seven Republican House members demanded Castro’s censure, something that will not happen under Pelosi’s leadership.  The ultimate problem is the leftist mob, whether BLM, Antifa, or the stray Ware / Sanders/ Eco Warrior whack job who decides to take the law in hands and do a little ethnic cleansing for the good of all; the return of the Jacobians.  Allahpundit ends his piece with the following:

The offense isn’t that Castro published private information, the offense is that he used his platform as a public official to amplify it knowing full well how his audience will abuse it. He’s a congressman openly encouraging harm, whether economic or otherwise, to people who exercised their right by supporting a political candidate. He’s supposed to protect his constituents, not victimize them. He should be censured by the House for this. In the meantime, two can play at this game. And inevitably will, to everyone’s detriment.

7. Cleanup. From the Land of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, the Baltimore Sun went after a group of conservatives who rolled their pickup trucks into one of West Baltimore’s most impoverished neighborhoods for a cleanup day.  They took trash out, loaded trash bags, cleared alleys, and cut overgrown grass.  The locals were quite pleased with the help.  The media, not so much, as this sort of help from pro-Trump conservatives must have some sort of ulterior motive.  Besides that, it was somehow demeaning for the residents who for some reason have been unable to keep from befouling their own nest.  The thing about all this is that Trump and conservatives are not going after the residents.  Rather, they are going after their elected leaders and the enablers of those leaders in the media.  The unsigned editorial has the prominent line “Call us skeptical.”  The Baltimore Sun, like all enablers of Blue City democrats, is good at making excuses for those democrats rather than celebrating neighbors helping neighbors.

 

8. Preggers. Great headline of the week:  Basketball player fails drug test when it finds he is pregnant.  Note that no coming out party or sex change is involved.  American basketball player DJ Cooper is currently playing in Europe and has bounced from team to team.  He tried to join the Bosnian team and took a drug test.  He came up positive with a chemical that is produced during pregnancy.  It turns out that he supplied urine from his girlfriend who apparently neither one knew was pregnant.  Needless to say, he has been suspended from the league through May 2020.  Reminds me of the May 2005 whizzinator story when then-Vikings running back Onterrio Smith was caught with one at the MSP airport.  Isn’t it just simpler to not dope?

9. Greenland. One of the recurring climatista scare stories is billions of tons of ice melting from the Greenland ice cap.  Unsurprisingly, this typically happens during the summer.  Willis Eschenbach in WUWT took apart one such claim in Greenland Endures last week.  The standard alarmist headline leading into this was:  Greenland lost 11 billion tons of surface ice in one day.  Oh, the horror.  Oh, the humanity.  The obvious question is 11 billion tons of ice a really big number for the Greenland ice cap?  It is a big number for a swimming pool or a home refrigerator, but for one of the largest islands on the planet, not so much.  Annual mass balance for the ice cap 1981 – 2010 has an average annual loss of 103 billion tons of ice over the last 30 years.   Greenland has so much ice, that a sustained annual loss of 103 billion tons would remove half the ice cap in a mere 12,500 years.  The first 20 years of data has an overall loss of ice.  But that loss reversed itself after 2010.  Cumulative ice loss from Greenland since 1971 is in the neighborhood of 5,000 billion tons, hair raising when graphed in the normal alarmist style, not so hair raising when graphed against the total mass of all ice in the cap, 2,600,000 billion tons.

More later –

– AG